Charles I: The Personal Rule (1)

Charles I, by Sir Anthony
van Dyck (1633)
Public domain

What was the Personal Rule?

The Personal Rule is the name given to the period between the dissolution of Charles's third parliament in March 1629 and his calling of what became known as the Short Parliament in November 1640.  His eleven-year rule without parliament was legal, but not necessarily wise politically, as without parliament it was difficult for the monarch to assess the feeling in the country at large. 

Charles could survive without having to call parliament as long as the country was not at war. This meant that his foreign policy changed abruptly. In April 1629 he made peace with France, leaving the Huguenots in the lurch. In June 1629 Peter Paul Rubens arrived in London as the envoy of Philip IV to arrange the exchange of ambassadors. In November 1630 Charles made with Spain (and Rubens was rewarded with a knighthood). 

Thus, while Europe was engaged in the Thirty Years' War, England stayed out of the conflict, even though Charles's sister was involved. He sent her money, but no army. However, English, Scottish, and Irish volunteers went to fight - mainly for the Protestant cause against Spain and the Holy Roman Empire. 

Peter Paul Rubens 'Peace and War'
a powerful anti-war painting,
a gift to Charles I.
National Gallery, Creative Commons.

Interpretations

What’s in a name? Personal rule? Eleven years’ tyranny? A time of discontent? Or a time when, according to the historian, the earl of Clarendon, England enjoyed 'the fullest measure of felicity that it had ever known’. Many remembered it as a golden age. The treaties with France and Spain removed England from the war that was devastating Europe. There was a run of good harvests and the king and queen were producing a large family. Court masques and court portraiture were powerful propaganda statements for peace and prosperity. 

The period is significant constitutionally because it saw a clash between two views of kingship that had already come to the fore in Charles's parliaments: 

1. the king subject to the common law; 
2. the king able to rule through the sole exercise of his prerogative. 

Some consensus is emerging among historians about the personal rule.

1. The Crown was genuinely attempting to reform government.
2. Charles and his court became increasingly isolated from the mainstream of contemporary religious, intellectual, and cultural life. This created a climate of distrust. When the Personal Rule broke down, it did so with alarming rapidity.  

The Court

Charles believed that he should govern the country as if it were the type of gigantic court masque that was being organised by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. He was surrounded by his paintings, his ceremonial, and his family, and cut off from the state of opinion in his three kingdoms. 


The Venetian ambassador described Charles’s court as ‘a rule of great decorum’ - this was a marked contrast to his father’s court. His concern for privacy meant that few had access to his person. The emphasis was on formality, deference, and ceremonial. In 1629 he revived the ancient custom of the monarch's processing to Windsor Castle on the eve of St George’s Day for the annual Garter Feast. In 1638 his son was installed as Knight of the Garter. 

Inigo Jones's Banqueting House,  Whitehall
the first classical building in England.

Charles embarked on grandiose plans to transform the rambling complex of Whitehall into a vast classical palace comparable to the Escorial. Ben Jonson advised people as they entered Jones’s Banqueting House: ‘Look up, to read the king in all his actions.’ Charles commissioned the Flemish Catholic artist, Peter Paul Rubens to paint the apotheosis of James I - at a cost of £3,000. He was so pleased by the painting of St George and the Dragon that he gave Rubens a diamond ring. 

Charles I, Henrietta Maria, Charles
Prince of Wales and Mary, Princess
Royal (1633)
Van Dyck, Royal Collection
Public domain

The same theme of a divinely appointed monarch is conveyed in Anthony van Dyck’s equestrian portraits. In 1627 he bought the vast collection of the Gonzaga Dukes of Mantua for £18,000.

Above all, court life was shown in the masques in which he and Henrietta Maria often took part, usually in roles which showed them replacing chaos with order and harmony.

Personal Rule government

The Privy Council formed the hub of government and in the absence of parliament, it handled an increasing volume of business. Charles presided over Council meetings more frequently than his father had done and was often present at Council committees, for which he came carefully prepared. He gave instructions that the registers of the Council’s proceedings were to be carefully indexed, and that a record should be kept of those decisions which created precedents for future action.


Increasingly he turned to an inner circle of advisers led by, among others, the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud and the Lord Treasurer Sir Richard Weston.

The Books of Orders

The Privy Council took a great interest in local government. Successive harvest failures combined with the privations of war led to soaring corn prices and unemployment in cloth manufacturing areas. After food riots in the West Country and the south of England in 1629-31, the Council issued 314 printed Books of Orders on 31 January, 1631. These were sent to the sheriffs for distribution to JPs and were a blueprint for local government, covering such matters as the regulation of alehouses, the apprehension of vagrants, the maintenance of highways and the relief of the poor. This activism on the part of central government was unprecedented.

Financial expedients

The perennial problem of early Stuart administration was the need to cut expenditure and increase revenue. The war years had left the Crown in severe financial distress, with a deficit of £2million by 1629, but by his death in 1635 Lord Treasurer Weston had reduced the annual deficit to only £18,000. 


One way of raising money was to used ancient and largely forgotten laws to yield additional revenue. Among the most lucrative examples of this ‘fiscal feudalism’ was distraint of knighthood. In January 1630 the king appointed a commission to fine those who owned freehold land worth £40 p.a. and were thus eligible for knighthood, but who had not presented themselves to be knighted at the coronation (later this was applied to the birth of his sons). The fines varied from £10 to £70. 

Monopolies and grants to corporations were revived . One grant (1631) of a monopoly  in soap manufacture to a syndicate with strong Catholic connotations proved especially unpopular, in spite of its claim to ‘wash whiter and sweeter’. The grant brought the Crown c. £300,000 pa but was abandoned in 1637 after consumer complaints that the ‘popish soap’ did not live up to claims on its behalf.

After Weston’s death the Crown relied even more on fiscal feudalism. It increased warship fines, taxed estates that found themselves (often unknowingly) within royal forests and declared that ship money was to become a permanent tax.

The Crown's financial policies were naturally unpopular, but they were also successful. For the first time since the death of Henry VII the monarch was able to live within his means. One tax, however, proved particularly controversial.

Ship money

Though England was on the sidelines, the continental wars continued, and England as a maritime nation became the target of belligerents. In 1633 pirates were especially active in the Channel and the merchants demanded protection. In 1634 Charles revived a traditional levy for naval support known as Ship Money. The levy required port towns to provide a ship of a certain size or compound at fixed cost so that one could be hired. They made their payments to the naval commissioners.


In July 1635 the government took the radical step of extending the levy to inland counties on the grounds that the whole realm benefited from safe seas. The decision was carefully formulated and demonstrated royal concern to avoid illegality. It was a traditional assessment, justified by the king’s emergency power to provide for the safety of the realm, and thus it avoided the prohibition on non-parliamentary taxation expressed in the Petition of Right.  

Because Ship Money was a county rate rather than a tax, the sheriff of each shire was made responsible for collecting it. In December the judges decided that the king had acted legally, and successive new writs were issued each year from 1636 to 1639. Sheriffs were given some leeway on how to interpret their commissions - most levied it on personal as well as real property. The result was that the tax affected more people than a parliamentary subsidy. It was a highly successful tax, generating a total of over £800,000, all of which was spent in building and equipping a sizeable fleet. Those who refused to pay, such as Lord Saye and Sele, were distrained rather than arrested and imprisoned.

Hampden’s case

John Hampden
Public domain

However in 1637 there occurred the first major legal challenge to the legality of Ship Money when John Hampden was tried in the Court of Exchequer for his refusal to pay. The case lasted from November 1637 to June 1638 and Hampden was defended by the barrister, Oliver St John. Seven out of the twelve judges (the narrowest possible margin) gave their verdict in favour of the Crown.


The case immortalized Hampden and stiffened the resolve of many to oppose the tax. In the absence of sessions of Parliament, there was no forum to express disquiet, but even before Hampden’s case Kentish gentry had debated its legality. However, opposition did not become overt and large-scale until Charles’s and Laud’s religious policies brought England and Scotland to the verge of war. In that sense, the tax was successful.